Review of E-Chinese Learning online 1 on 1 lessons

[suMMit]

Having just wrapped up two years of studying with E-Chinese Learning, I thought I’d write a short review.

 

The way their system works is you decide how many lessons a week you want and you pay upfront for a year of lessons. Every week you take your lessons at anytime you want during that particular week, 24-7. You need to reserve the lesson at least 24hrs prior and can choose from any of the teachers that are available in your desired time slot. You can cancel and change lesson times as much as you want, as long as its done more than 24 hours before the lesson. You’re allowed 3 changes per month with less than 24 hours notice. If you want the same teacher all the time, at a certain slot, you pretty much need to book the lesson 3 weeks in advance. Lessons are 50 minutes. 

 

The cost of the lessons varies a bit depending on how many hours a week you study and I personally got six weeks free when I signed up for my second year. I think overall I ended up paying around 18 usd per lesson.

 

There are around 100 teachers available to choose from. All are female, all are in China - both north and south. I always thought it a shame that there are no male teachers. They range in age from 20s to 50s. All of them were friendly to me, some taught in a way I like , and some did not. I mainly studied with a single teacher for the first year, she left and I tried new ones until I found another one I liked a lot and then studied with her for 6 months. After that, my work schedule became a bit unpredictable and I couldn’t book lessons far in advance, so for my last six months I studied with dozens of teachers. I got frustrated with many for speaking too much needless English until I finally got fed up and sent a message to the teacher manager. After that they must have put a note in the system for me because I never heard another word of English.

 

When I started with them, they suggested I study Chinese Made Easier, as my interest was Chinese for daily life in China. I started midway through book 1 and finished book 3. The series is a bit dated, but I found for the most part everything is still applicable and I like the books. I believe you can ask them to use any book you want.

 

They have a system where the teacher always knows where the last teacher left off, what homework you were assigned, and where to start the next class. It seems that that also make notes of other things so a new teacher knows where you live ,etc. I also told my long term teachers certain preferences that I had - such as not asking me to make random, meaningless sentences with new vocabulary - and for the most part any teacher I had followed my requests. Never had a teacher miss a class or arrive late. 

 

I considered signing up with them for another year, but since my work schedule is too hard to predict in advance, it’s difficult for me to choose the same teacher in their system. I also like the flexibility of Italki where I don’t have to lock into a year of a certain amount of classes a week, and a variety of teaching rates to choose from. The other reason is that they recently switched to the Class-in App which I found inferior to the software the had been using. I don’t know what software they were using because it was seamlessly accessed through their webpage - I suspect it was Voov. It was clear as a bell, great connection. Class-in sometimes has a an annoying lag and once in a while an echo. Lord knows why they switched.

 

All in all, I did enjoy and benefit a lot from Ecl and, one advantage of being locked into a certain number of lessons per week, only missed one class in 2 years.